Slow Country

Slow Country
Slow Country (Gorillaz Live 2001)
Slow Country (Demon Detour)
Slow Country (Damon Albarn live with backing band The Heavy Seas, 2014)

""Ghost Town" is the sort of tune you can easily play in Detroit and it would easily send shivers down your spine. I like the shivers."
- Damon Albarn, on The Specials and music he fell in love with at age 13

The first Gorillaz album has two bands that cast a large shadow over the album's sound. These two groups are trip hop trio Massive Attack and ska band The Specials. The latter group's influence can be particularly heard on the album's penultimate track, "Slow Country".

Although The Specials are most well known for being a ska group that fused together the fashion of 1960's mod culture and the attitude of the 1970's punk rock scene, The Specials evolved their sound by the year 1980. With the release of the album "More Specials", the band took their previous fun skankin' tunes and combined them with new influences from another one of Damon's musical fascinations, dubby reggae. It is around this time that The Specials released their magnum opus, "Ghost Town". "Ghost Town" expressed the feelings of isolation and resentment in poorer English communities and did so through the use of dark dubby tactics instead of the usual fun party ska music in their repertoire.

"Ghost Town" became one of Damon Albarn's favorite songs and it was seemingly his goal to do some kind of reggae music ever since he formed a band. He would sometimes jam with Blur on reggae vamps in concert, however the band wanted nothing to do with it. So Blur became the outlet for Damon to experiment in anything under the "rock" category, whether it meant daring and experimental post-punk or plain ol' power pop. With Gorillaz, Damon saw the opportunity to due away with the whole ideas of genre altogether, and do whatever it was he felt like doing. With "Slow Country", Damon achieved this goal.

The beat of "Slow Country" is based around a sample of the beginning of kick drum and wind noises from The Specials' "Ghost Town". Damon decided to form a whole new song out of only about 4 seconds of build-up from another song. Jason Cox took this short sample and doubled it with his drum set and Junior Dan added one of his many signature dubby bass lines on top. Damon then added a piano riff as the main hook and a guitar playing two upstroke reggae chords (which is processed by Dan The Automator to such an extent that it sounds like a synthetic backing vocal).

With the addition of the piano and guitar, the song becomes more fun and uptempo compared to the usual Gorillaz dub. Damon takes a dub piece on isolation and turns it into an upbeat ska tune (combining an influence of classic Specials into a track which already contained influence of latter day Specials). Damon sings about living in the city and the struggles involved with it. People who are denied the ability to do what they love in order to "get money". However unlike many of the first album's songs, "Slow Country" offers a solution. Damon tells you not to sit and mope ("can't stand your loneliness"), and instead to focus on things you enjoy like the "night life". You may "get a lot of problems", but you can "kick a lot of them." Damon sells the song's good vibes with cheery synthesizer interruptions and a heart wrenching scat break done completely in falsetto.

When played live, the song takes on a more organic ska feel. The guitars are unprocessed, the bass and drums are raw, the keyboards are bouncy and Damon genuinely seems to have fun adding in spontaneous scat fills at will. Miracuously, Damon brought the song back on his "Everyday Robots" solo tour, extending the song's catchy and hypnotic groove out in order to hype up the crowd. "Slow Country" is not only a fan favorite and highlight of the band's first album, but it just might be one of Damon's greatest artistic feats. Here's hoping "Slow Country" will be brought back to Gorillaz live gigs once again.